B OOK R EVIEWS PDR 39(2) 347 ROBERT D. KAPLAN The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate New York: Random House, 2012. xxii + 403 p. $28.00; $16.00 (pbk.). This book presents the big picture. Robert Kaplan, foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for a quarter century, has written his fourteenth book, an impressive geo- political world tour animated by his desire to escape the confines of disciplines and bend our view of the political lines on the map. Along the way, Kaplan implores us to be mindful of the limits, posed by dirt, rock, and distance, to our Utopian desire to bring forth a better world. He will be familiar to demographers from his contro- versial article, “The Coming Anarchy” (The Atlantic, February 1994), which argued that population explosion, urbanization, and resource depletion are destabilizing already fragile postcolonial states, threatening the developed world and the global order. Like his previous work, The Revenge of Geography advances a realist, pessimistic storyline that aims to puncture the optimistic “end of war” assumptions of liberal internationalists and sound a cautionary note about humanitarian intervention. The book is written in Kaplan’s trademark fast-paced style, rich in description and fleshed out by the author’s extensive travels. It is fascinating to read and nicely updates the canon of geopolitical analysis for the twenty-first century. It argues that geography, defined broadly to include demography and much more, matters for politics. An impressive figure, Kaplan was named one of the 100 most important global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2011. Coming to public attention when Bill Clinton was photographed clutching Kaplan’s third book, Balkan Ghosts, in 1993, Kaplan’s is a household name in US foreign policy circles. During the debacle of the former Yugoslavia, Balkan Ghosts’ ancient hatreds thesis helped dissuade the Clin- ton administration from intervening. Yet Kaplan’s instincts are neoconservative or liberal interventionist: he favored military action in Yugoslavia in 1994 and Iraq in 2003—though he now regrets the latter—and lectures frequently to the US security establishment. This book is not therefore a realist warning against American mili- tary adventurism in the mode of a John Mearsheimer or Samuel Huntington, but rather a cautionary tale calling for the United States to be mindful of limits imposed by mother nature. “In 1999, I took a freighter...from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku...to Krasno- vodsk in Turkmenistan,” writes Kaplan. He describes the trip as a descent from an enchanting Persianate civilization into featureless, barren, steppe barbarism. Kaplan is not the first to be seduced by Silk Road Eurasia. For centuries, waves of mounted invaders have ridden out of the East to conquer Europe: Huns, Scythians, Mongols, Turks. In Asia, the flow has been westward or southward, with Mongols, Mughals, and Manchus blazing the trail. Halford John Mackinder, the father of geopolitics, declared the Eurasian steppe to be the “pivot” of history from which invaders make and unmake civilizations. Enjoining us to dissolve the borders in our mind to imagine power flowing organically like currents around landforms, he spoke of the globe as consisting of an interconnected “World Island” of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Here live three quarters of the planet’s people, with those in the New World cut off from much of the political action. From a cartographic perspective, the World Island consists of a